European Historical Drama in the Digital Age

Law and Management Building, University of York, UK

Tuesday 17 March, 2015

Summary:

In today’s media-saturated society, films and television dramas are one of the primary ways in which we learn about our past. But as well as being educational, informative and entertaining, historical dramas are often the focus for intense debate about their historical accuracy, whose story gets told and what these stories mean to us in the present. Moreover, with so many films and television dramas now reaching a transnational audience, they can also become embroiled in wider political and economic agendas, from tourism campaigns to diplomatic disputes. Witness, for example, the way in which the recent German mini-series Generation War (Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter) prompted outrage in neighbouring Poland for portraying the Polish anti-Nazi resistance as fanatical anti-Semites.

This one-day conference, organised by the MeCETES project with the financial support of HERA, the Centre for Digital Heritage and Department of Theatre Film and Television, University of York, brings together some of Europe’s leading film and television scholars to discuss historical drama in contemporary Europe. Addressing issues of production, representation, distribution and audience reception, it will focus on key case-studies from Britain, Germany and Denmark. It will also address the question of how digitisation is changing the way historical dramas are produced, circulated and consumed. Our aim is to identify some of the emerging trends within this important area of research.